I was having lunch at the recent LinuxCon and Plumbers conference with a colleague, bragging as usual about how much I love my home near Portland, Oregon. He was having none of it - he feels like Boulder, Colorado where he lives is superior and he was frankly being belligerent about it. (Imagine that, and he even worked for me for a while!) I suppose there are some things to like about Boulder, but I trudged through hip-deep snow there just last winter. In Portland, people claims it rains all the time, but this summer keeps going on and on.

It's good weather to fix bugs in.

Why? I think when the sky turns dark and rainy is a perfect time to sit down and think about feature development with absolutely no distractions. You stay inside anyway, so why not develop code? On the other hand, if you get frustrated with the way something was coded or finding a bug, it's nice to get outside and vent some steam.

We stated from the beginning that bug fixing would be a key part of the v1.3 release and indeed it will be. As a reminder, here are the themes we announced for this release:

Continuity / Refresh

Stabilization & Adoption

Usability

And true to our word, we will have about 500 bugs fixed in this release. We also have a long list of improvements which will be visible to developers. Here is a list compiled for me by Paul Eggleton. In addition, we have made countless package updates, and a major improvement to both the command line bitbake interface and the graphical developer experience.

eglibc 2.16 -

gcc 4.7 -

Linux kernel 3.4 -

Eliminated intermediate step when building cross compiler toolchain -

Mesa can now provide GLES accelerated graphics without X11 -

Relocatable SDK -

yocto-bsp script for automating the initial parts of creating a new BSP -